P: Provide support for Linux

I agree with Martijn. A friend, for example, sees me working on my Linux pc and really would like to switch. The only thing that is keeping him from doing so is the fact that he is so used to using Photoshop and Lightroom and doesn't want to learn working with Gimp or one of the other raw converter. If Adobe would port LR to Linux this would probably mean that all people who are now using Darktable, Lightzone or RawTherapee would buy LR, at least to have it available to them. And a lot of potential Linux users would really switch. They only need to have a push. But, if Adobe has made secret agreements with Windows and Apple or some other software running on these platforms, never to port their software to Linux, than we can wait forever... 😞

1,5% may not seem like much, but Adobe has a HUGE userbase, making those 1,5% count into the tens of thousands in potential. Not right now of course, since Linux is not supported, but if it were, I think it may give Linux (and Adobe) a small boost. For many people, it is the one thing that makes them stuck with Windows, or move over to OSX in an act of desperation.

LR Mobile is a joke, and you (as a "champ") should know it. But seeing how LR is such an incredible CPU and memory hog, it's understandable (for now) that the mobile version is crippled.

It's not Adobe that needs a push, it's Linux users which remain a relatively tiny portion of the marketplace:

http://www.statista.com/statistics/21...


And tablets/phones are on the rise, not Linux, hence LR Mobile:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_s...


And I'm sure Adobe has statistics for adobe.com website visits that more accurately reflect interest in their products on each platform.

One doesn't have to hate Windows in order to switch to Linux ;)

Personally I like both. Both have some solid points to go by, but Linux' greatest disadvantage is the lack of popular commercial software like the Adobe programs, as well as a couple of other tools I'm using in my workflow.

Linux on the other hand, is free and comes with a (not really but still)-emulator called Wine, to create lazy developers of Windows/OSX only software. So it's that, or Adobe couldn't give a flying fish about Linux. That would be incredibly stupid, so we'll have to assume Adobe is plotting at least *something*.

We just need to push a little bit.

I would like to vote for a Linux version too. I'm a professional photographer who switched from Windows and Mac to Linux about 8 years ago and don't ever want to go back. I'm using Aftershot Pro at this moment, together with Darktable, but really would like to use Lightroom. Some people say just use Windows for photos and Linux for the rest, but I hate that idea. I'm always getting so annoyed when I'm sitting behind a Windows pc or Mac 😉 and also I'm a webdesigner too, so I need to be able to switch fast and constantly between my website work and photos. If Adobe really likes to have a monopoly on photo editing software, then they should defenitely create Linux ports of Photoshop and Lightroom.

Also, as Chris notes, many APIs are quite different between MacOS and Linux. The ven diagram of the APIs Lightroom needs and those that are common to Mac OS and Linux due to its shared Unix underpinnings has a relatively small overlap compared to the parts where the APIs are different (sometimes substantially so).

Actually, Lightroom uses platform widgets on Mac and Windows (among other APIs), though some of them are skinned a bit to fit Lightroom's style. They are bound to Lua so code that defines how parts of the interface are assembled is mostly cross platform, but the widgets themselves are platform native.

There's actually already some platform parity issues between the Mac and Windows implementations of this UI subsystem because it was originally built on Mac and Windows was warped to fit that model. I'm not a UI dev and know even less of Linux particulars. If it mapped well onto the existing abstraction, it might not be too bad. If it didn't, it'd be a pretty significant chunk of work to get it to behave (as Windows was, back in the pre-.1.0 beta days when that port was underway).

There are a number of other aspects of Lightroom that bind to platform APIs that would need to be re-written for Linux (some of those could theoretically be switched to use lower level Unix APIs to share code between Mac OS and Linux, but not all), but the UI framework is one of the larger subsystems in terms of OS specific API surface area.

The APIs on MacOS and Linux are almost completely different. There is very little that could be reused.

GPU acceleration is pretty much the only part that is truly different from either Windows or OSX. Adobe should be able to get pretty far using OpenCL, although Lightroom could function perfectly fine on CPU power only.

The rest of the program should be relatively simple. Adobe is already rolling their own GUI widgets, so the rest can easily be taken from the OSX version, since OSX is internally quite close to Unix, and therefor to Linux. Some other parts can probably be copied from the Windows version, as the graphical stuff in OSX is pretty "unique".

I am right now in the 30day the trial of Lightroom, I am going to end up buying it most probably, but not the subscription model, I am going to pay the full price for the standalone version. Right now I will have to use Lightroom inside virtualbox with shared folders between host and client OS but it is a pain to use really and it is not working that good, especially the map module kind of lags.

Just make a Linux version even if at the beginning has limitations like not being able to use GPU power for example since I think that would be a tricky part to implement consistently on Linux. We, the linux users, would still be a lot better served than having to use it inside a virtual machine, using wine, or doing dual-boot.